As cold weather began to abate in Texas, power was being restored across the state, but millions of people remained without safe drinking water throughout the US south as the region struggled to recover from a crippling week of winter weather.
Around 370,000 households remained without power in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi on Friday morning, with millions in the region under water-boil advisories, after record low temperatures damaged pipes and infrastructure throughout the southern United States.
In Texas, almost half the state’s residents, around 13 million people remained under boil advisories, with over 700 water supply systems impacted, according to an update from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality on Thursday. In Austin alone, the state’s capital, the city reported losing 325 million gallons of water due to burst pipes.
In Jackson, Mississippi, most of the city’s 150,000 residents were without water on Thursday night. Jackson mayor Antar Lumumba told a press conference the city faced a shortage of chemicals to treat the water, despite pumping efforts to refill city tanks.
In Louisiana, around a million residents were without clean water on Thursday, with 98 water supply systems out across the state, according to state governor John Bel Edwards. On Thursday, President Biden approved a disaster declaration for the state. The president authorized a similar disaster declaration for Texas earlier in the week, allowing the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) to coordinate disaster relief efforts in the state.
Late on Thursday, Texas governor Greg Abbott announced the state had sought another major disaster declaration which would “allow eligible Texans to apply for assistance to help address broken pipes and related property damage,” according to a press release.
Joe Biden spoke with Abbott about crisis on Thursday, and a statement from the White House said Biden “shared his intentions to instruct additional federal agencies to look into any immediate steps that could be taken to support Texans”.
Abbott also announced he will ask the legislature “to mandate the winterization of Texas’ power system and for the legislature to ensure the necessary funding for winterization,” according to the press release
The frigid temperatures have moved into the Appalachians, northern Maryland and southern Pennsylvania, and later the north-east as the extreme weather was blamed for the deaths of at least 58 people, including a Tennessee farmer trying to save two calves that apparently wandered into a frozen pond and 17-year-old Oklahoma girl who fell into a frozen pond.
A growing number of people have died trying to keep warm. In and around the west Texas city of Abilene, authorities said six people died of the cold – including a 60-year-old man found dead in his bed in his frigid home. In the Houston area, a family died from carbon monoxide as their car idled in their garage.
Utilities from Minnesota to Texas used rolling blackouts to ease strained power grids. But the remaining Texas outages were mostly weather-related, according to the state’s grid manager, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas.
Fema acting administrator Bob Fenton said Friday that teams were in Texas with fuel, water, blankets and other supplies.
“What has me most worried is making sure that people stay warm,” Fenton said on CBS This Morning, while urging people without heat to go to a shelter or warming center.
Rotating outages for Texas could return if electricity demand rises as people get power and heating back, said Dan Woodfin, the council’s senior director of system operations.
The crisis continues to exacerbate and demonstrate the chronic inequality in Texas and across the region. In Houston authorities reported that the mass power and water outages led to more than 500 complaints from residents of price gouging costs for water, gas and rent, double the number of grievances lodged at the start of the pandemic, according to the Houston Chronicle.
Two of Houston Methodist’s community hospitals had no running water and still treated patients but canceled most non-emergency surgeries and procedures for Thursday and possibly Friday, a spokeswoman said.
And across Texas’s vast prison network inmates complained of sub-zero temperatures and stagnant, overflowing toilets, according to local reports.
